> Well, i'm not sure if this list is working because I have not yet
> recieved any emails from it but...
>
> What ideas do people have for improving relations?

(Resend, apologies if this appears twice)
What about making more use of the announce list? At the moment it's only
ever used for GLSA's, which from talking to a few people at Gentoo UK
and on IRC, most seem to use the utilities for anyway.
Could we create a very-low-traffic, developer-posts-only list that is
used for announcing important package changes? The list could also be
used for other announcements (not sure exactly what - events where
Gentoo devs will be, regional meets, other things). If people feel that
using the same list for other announcements too would create too much
traffic, consider creating multiple lists, which would allow people to
subscribe to only the types of messages that they want to see.
These lists could be heavily advertised on the forums and in the Gentoo
Handbook.
To remark on this "we'll only get atypical users responding so we
shouldn't ask at all" view, that's just silly. In my view, open source
is about community, and if people don't speak up then that's just their
choice. Why should everyone suffer just because some people don't want
to interact?
Surely developers can weigh up the feedback they get and decide for
themselves what might be atypical and what might be useful? And I think
that if you do it right, word will spread and more people will respond
over time. Sure, you'll never get everyone, but that's life.
Have you considered that many users may currently believe that there
aren't any ways they can communicate with developers generally? Or even
if they do know about IRC and mailing lists, believe that the developers
don't want to hear what they have to say?
On that note, an idea to get more users involved: What about scheduled
developer chats with specific projects where users can openly ask
questions and developers can perhaps give updates on what they've been
up to recently? They don't have to be particularly frequent - once a
month rotating round different projects or something.
Another idea could be to create a specific "developer Q&A" forum where
developers can pose questions to the users and perhaps vice-versa too
(some sort of moderation system for questions from users might be
required, and yes it would require work, but doesn't anything that
involves interacting with users?)
AllenJB
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